The leaders of Britain’s three main political parties have closed ranks to condemn Nigel Farage after the Ukip leader called for the scrapping of the bulk of the country’s anti-discrimination laws.
David Cameron said Farage was guilty of attention seeking while Ed Miliband branded the remarks by the Ukip leader as “wrong, divisive and dangerous”.
Nick Clegg said Farage was guilty of instilling fear in people by conflating various sensitive issues, including warning that some Muslims want to form a ”fifth column” and calling for the scrapping of most of Britain’s anti-discrimination laws. The deputy prime minister accused Farage of acting in an irresponsible way by mixing fears about violent Islamist extremism with concerns about immigration from eastern Europe.
“He instils fear by confusing a lot of these things,” Clegg said on his weekly radio phone-in programme on LBC.
Farage replied to the criticisms by tweeting the prime minister and the Labour leader in defence of his remarks that were made in a Channel 4 interview with Trevor Phillips, the former chair of the equality and human rights commission.
In his tweet to Cameron, Farage said:
In his tweet to Miliband, the Ukip leader said:
The row erupted after Farage told Phillips that Britain faced an “especial problem” with some Muslim immigrants who did not want to integrate. “People do see a fifth column living within our country, who hate us and want to kill us,” he said.
Farage also said race and other anti-discrimination legislation should be abolished on the grounds that people were “colour blind”. He said employers should be entitled to discriminate in favour of a British, rather than a Polish, worker.
Pressed on which discrimination laws he would get rid of, the Ukip leader said: “Much of it. I think the employer should be much freer to make decisions on who he or she employs.”
Asked whether there would be a law against discrimination on the grounds of race or colour under Ukip, Farage added: “No … because we take the view, we are colour blind. We as a party are colour blind.”
The Ukip leader hit back at his critics and said he had not been talking about race. He insisted that he had simply raised concerns about two matters: extremists and the way in which EU laws meant that a Polish worker had the same employment rights in the UK as a British worker.
Farage told LBC before the Clegg phone-in: “The first thing I said was that we’ve never before had a migrant group come to Britain who have tried to change our culture. And unfortunately there are a small number in the Muslim community who genuinely want to introduce sharia law to Britain, etc. That is a wholly uncontroversial comment.
“The second thing I was saying was this: small businesses … feel very, very pressured by continued legislation and in many cases fearful of taking on staff. What I said is if a British employer, a small business, wants to be employ a British person over somebody from Poland, they should be able to do that without fear that they have contravened discrimination laws. That is all I have said.”
Clegg responded to Farage by telling LBC that the Ukip leader was instilling fear in people by conflating various sensitive issues on immigration and extremism. The deputy prime minister said: “He is mixing sharia law, violent extremist, red tape, how small businesses run their businesses, into one great – he is skilled at this – mix.
“It is a fact to say there is a very, very worrying phenomenon of extremism, and in some cases violent extremism, within parts of our Muslim communities. That is quite different to saying you scrap all [anti-discrimination laws]. It is very, very unhelpful to conflate the decision a baker in Orpington can make about a Polish or a British worker with violent extremism that you see in Iraq and Syria. That is what is so irresponsible about the way in which Nigel Farage handles these issues. He instils fear by confusing a lot of these things.”
Sadiq Khan, the shadow justice secretary, said: “This is one of the most shocking things I have ever heard from a mainstream politician and demonstrates breath-taking ignorance.
“We have made huge progress on tackling racial inequality and discrimination in this country, partly because of Labour’s strong anti-discrimination laws, but things are still far from perfect. When my parents moved to London they frequently saw signs saying ‘no blacks, no dogs, no Irish’; what Ukip is suggesting would take us back to those days.”
Ukip took a bullish approach to the criticisms. In addition to Farage’s tweets the party highlighted a Facebook advertisement for a job by the Dutch offshore energy company advertising for riggers and forklift from the Baltic States to work on a project in the UK. “Baltic nationality is required,” the advert by Oceanwide Vlissingen says. This would be illegal under the EU laws Farage is complaining about which say that all EU citizens have to be treated equally.
The Ukip leader said: “It is this sort of anti-British worker discrimination that shows the disadvantage that British workers are facing in the jobs market.”
